200mm tapeouts have briefly became more profitable than leading edge ones on the wave of panic buying.
On my side, I lost a lot of firmware devs to poaching by companies migrating between microchip brands, and ready to pay just anything, to the point of me myself being tempted.
It's an ultimate irony to see that 200mm fabs in the West were closed one after another for "low profitability" just to see them missing out on this money volcano
If those fabs where still around probably profitability would be even lower and there wouldn't be so massive profits. Irony is that we haven't been paying some more, to keep slack in supply.
Will you be ready to move to China? Working of physical products requires being there. We don't do much software only projects.
We tried DHLing prototypes around before, it didn't work out. People still need tons of expensive tooling, go to other specialist companies with these prototypes, etc. Too much pingpong
On my side, I lost a lot of firmware devs to poaching by companies migrating between microchip brands, and ready to pay just anything, to the point of me myself being tempted.